Satan Wants Me (35 page)

Finally I was word-perfect with, ‘Hallo Maud. It’s me, Peter. Are you in any danger from the Devil or his minions?’ So I picked up the receiver and very carefully dialled Maud’s number. If a demon had answered the phone, I would have just dropped the receiver and run. However, it was Maud who answered, and as soon as she did so, I knew I was right to have rung her. She sounded terrified.

‘Peter? Is that really you? Thank God! I don’t know what to do. Thank God you rang. A horrible man came round to the salon last weekend and asked the strangest questions. And then someone has been leaving dead animals on my doorstep. And I think that I am being followed to and from work. Please, you have to help me.’

‘OK. Keep calm. How am I going to be able to help you?’

‘Can I come to you? Peter, I need you. You got me into this. You have to protect me. You owe me that. I am so very frightened. Let me come to you. Please.’

I thought about this, but not for very long, for it was clear that she was in trouble and, besides it would be cool to have Maud with us in Farnham. So then, mustering all the straight thinking that I was capable of, I gave her careful directions about what to pack and then how to shake off any possible trail. She was to go to Camden Town Tube Station and wait on the platform for a tube. She was to get on the tube and then get out of the carriage at the last possible moment before the doors closed. Then she was to exit the tube station and take a taxi to John Lewis’s department store and walk quickly through the store and out through a door at the rear and then take a second taxi to Waterloo Station. At Waterloo, she was to buy a ticket to Portsmouth, even though she should get off the train at Farnham. I told her that Sally and I would meet her at the station at noon tomorrow. Although tearful, she sounded terribly relieved. I just hope she lasts the night and that the Satanists do not get to her before she has packed and set out on her way. It now occurs to me that I never even got to say the words I had so carefully rehearsed.

Once I was back at the cottage, I put on the radio. A disc jockey on Radio Caroline informed me that it was half past three in the morning. I had no idea. Thinking about it, it was really weird the way Grace Slick’s voice changed into smoke and the smoke into Maud’s brilliant white body. It was like she was one of those dead spirits that get trapped in the grooves of a record’s vinyl, just as in Mr Cosmic’s theory. I put ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ back on the record player, but this time no smoke issues from the record player. Grace Slick’s voice is just a voice, so I deduce from this that I must be coming down. It has been a pretty good trip and I am pleased with myself for having been able to write throughout the first part of the trip until the total overload took over. My writing hand still trembles from the force of the drug racing through its veins. I fancy that this diary of mine has something of the quality of a scientific record. Straights dismiss tripping as just a way for young people to get their kicks. One year it was a fad for skiffle and hula-hoops, the next year it’s LSD, and so on, blah blah, blah. This is not fair. I always take LSD in the spirit of a psychological investigator. Drug-taking is as much serious research as anything that a university has to offer. I have merely slipped one letter back from LSE to LSD. Sally and I are the conquistadors of inner space. We, all of us, exist on the peripheries of our own minds. Without the guidance of drugs we would be dopily unaware of the vast molten core within ourselves. As it is we are at the beginning of Humanity’s greatest adventure yet. I must sleep now.

Over breakfast, Sally has to tell me about her trip. She is so excited that she cannot sit down, but stands over her cornflakes and rattles away. Sally does not write things down while she is tripping, for she believes that that would spoil the flow of the experience. Nevertheless, she remembers quite a lot of her visionary night-journey. There was the rape by Bill and Ben. She kept asking Ben if he thought she was beautiful and he kept saying no, which was a lie and each time Ben lied his wooden penis grew a bit longer, and, since the penis was inside Sally, the lies of the Flowerpot Man had a definite erotic charge. Then there was more weird sex with Bill, with hundreds of Munchkins and finally with me – except that the fairies had taken away my head and replaced it with the head of a hare. Apparently I liked having my long ears licked. One of the salient features of acid is the way it works on and with one’s sex drive.

Sally was so excited by her long night of imaginary sex, that it was ages before I could get a word in. But then, when I did manage to speak and I explained how Maud was being menaced by the Black Book Lodge and that she needed to take refuge with us and that she would be with us in a matter of hours, Sally was instantly cast down. She reckoned that Maud was making all this voodoo stuff up, simply because she wants to be with me.

‘Peter, can’t you see it? This has got nothing to do with Satanism and everything to do with Maud’s puppy-love for you. She is obsessive. She will eat you up if she can. Besides this place is tiny and she’s pretty tall and hefty for a chick. There is simply no room for her here.’

‘She can sleep on the floor in this room, until she finds a place of her own.’

(We were in what I suppose would be our sitting-room, except that as it has no furniture, only a leaking mattress, so we sprawl about in here and it is therefore more of a lying-room.)

‘I just know that she is going to spoil everything. It’s you I’m thinking of, since she really gets on your nerves. She will drive you mad if you live under the same roof as her for more than a day.’

‘Sally, I’m really sorry, but I have got to do this. I am kind of responsible for her. Whether I like it or not, she has become part of my karma.’

I could not persuade Sally to join me in walking down to the station, so I set off alone and arrived there just in time to see Maud step off the train. She was the only one to alight at Farnham. She was so overloaded with stuff that it was hard to understand how she could have shaken off any kind of tail – particularly as she teetered on stilettos and kept tripping over her luggage. Finally she gave up trying to move with all her cases and bags and waited helplessly until I came up to her. She was wearing a white silk blouse with mutton-sleeves, a very mini black mini, black leather gloves and lots of jangly silver bracelets. Her idea of dressing for the country, I suppose. She stood amongst her luggage clutching a handbag and a little umbrella.

I walked up to her, ready to stoop to pick up as many of her cases as I could manage, but then I just stood before her, gazing at her and not knowing what to say. The weird thing was that this morning, once I was sure that I was down from the trip, I had gone out into the garden and picked a blade of grass and gazed at it with full attention and I had seen that it was just a blade of grass. It did not pulsate or anything, nor did gazing at it offer any special help in understanding how the universe worked. That is always the way with trips and it is a real drag – except the really weird thing was that on that same trip last night I had had a vision of Maud as incredibly beautiful and now that I was gazing at Maud in the flesh on the sunny station platform, she still looked incredibly beautiful. It was as if the LSD was continuing to act selectively on my head and heart, so that I was experiencing a hallucinatory vision of the arrival of a mighty sex goddess in this small Surrey town. I wanted to lay her there and then in front of the ticket-office.

So we just stood there silently gazing at one another. Then she suddenly burst into tears.

‘Peter, dearest Peter, these last few days have just been so horrible, but now I am with you I know it will be all right.’

I stepped forward to give her a comforting hug and she practically overbalanced on her high heels, so she had to cling very tight in order not to fall right over and I almost fainted in her arms.

‘You know I have been so worried about you,’ she whispered, her breath cool in my ear. ‘After what you told me, I was more afraid for you than anything.’

Then we broke apart and she started fishing in her handbag, for her make-up kit. She had to redo her mascara, before we could set out walking past the Maltings and up the hill between the laburnum hedges towards the cottage. Maud has become a fever in my head and a pain between my legs. I cannot think of anything except Maud. God knows how I am going to square this with Sally.

As we walked into the cottage, Maud turned to me and said, ‘We can be happy here.’ Then having realised what she had said, she blushed. ‘I mean, I know that you and Sally will be very happy here together.’

Sally, who had been standing on her head in the lotus position when we entered, hastily untangled herself and got to her feet so that she was face to face with Maud – no that is not right, for Sally’s head came no higher than Maud’s bosom. Maud, somewhat startled, looked down on her.

‘Hello again.’ And Maud extended her hand, holding it out in a way that suggested that she expected it to be kissed. Sally muttered something inaudible (for all I know, it was a curse), but she took Maud’s hand and shook it.

Then Sally turned to me and asked, ‘How long is she staying?’

Maud looked at me in mute appeal.

‘As long as she needs to, Sally,’ I said firmly.

Then Maud broke into tears again. Between sobs, she explained to Sally how she had left her job and fled her flat. How she had no friends in the world except me, Peter, and that she hoped Sally would be a good friend too. She knew she was being a drag, coming down here when the place was so small and only just big enough for the two of us, but she had nowhere else to go and she was absolutely terrified of all this supernatural stuff, and the dead animals on her doorstep in London had had pins stuck in their eyes. Maud did not want the Satanists to put pins in her eyeballs. After a while she was unable to get any more words out even in gulps. She just stood there bawling noisily like a small child.

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Sally snorted and disappeared into the bedroom. I put an arm round Maud and she slowly quietened down. After about ten minutes, Sally reappeared with her sleeping bag.

‘She will have to sleep on the mattress in this room, until she has found a place to move to and she will have to roll up the bedding every morning.’

And Sally busied herself in laying out the bag and pushing all Maud’s luggage to one corner of the room, while Maud sat on a corner of the mattress and set about once more redoing her make-up. Then Maud started to unpack, but it was not long before she discovered that, in her panicky flight from London, she had forgotten to pack all sorts of things, including any underwear. So she set off into Farnham to do some shopping. When she reappeared hours later, she found Sally and me sitting out on the grass at the back of the cottage. Sally was still doing her yogic breathing exercises, while I was struggling to sort out some kind of filecard system for my thesis. However, Maud, who was evidently an enthusiastic shopper insisted on interrupting our peace by displaying her purchases. She put out her newly purchased items of underwear on the grass for our inspection. There were about a dozen items: several pairs of ornately lacy panties, some bras, a basque, a mulberry-coloured camisole, a midnight-blue slip. Sally thinks that less is more where underwear is concerned and she gazed on Maud’s purchases with incredulous distaste.

‘What do you think?’ Maud asked, looking carefully to her, as if Sally was her older sister.

Sally laughed incredulously.

‘Maud, you are absurd! Put them away.’

Maud blushed crimson and hastily gathered up the underwear and disappeared into the cottage. At length, she reemerged with her handbag. From this she extracted a diary and, seating herself some distance away from us, she busied herself in writing it. And I too am writing in my diary, surreptitiously looking up from time to time to gaze with bated lust on Maud, who scribbles away, biting her lips as she does so. I think that she must find spelling difficult. I had forgotten that Maud kept a diary. It obviously is a diary, one of those school-girly affairs with a heart-shaped lock. Well, at least now she has got something worth recording in it.

The afternoon, though still very warm, had turned dark and heavy. There were lots of midges about. For a long time there was no sound except the scratching of pens and the cooing of wood pigeons. Finally Sally broke the silence.

‘The sun is down over the yard-arm.’

What the hell is a yard-arm? Whatever. In our new ménage in the country, reference to the yard-arm is the traditional prelude to rolling an early-evening joint or two. Sally went to fetch the ritual Indian brass tray. Then she set to work slowly melting and crumbling the hash, rolling the cardboard tips and sprinkling tobacco on the Rizla papers. Sally maintains that the preparation of the joints is as important as their consumption. The whole business is like a Zen tea-making ritual and has to be done with slow ceremony. Maud, who still sat at a distance from us, looked uncomfortable and I guess that she was trying to nerve herself up to make some protest about drug-taking being illegal, or dangerous to mental health, or something, but she was too embarrassed and too conscious of her status as guest to make her protest.

At last Sally was ready to light up and, having taken one big draw on the joint, she crawled over to Maud to present her with it.

Maud raised a hand in an attempt to avert the evil object.

‘I’m afraid I don’t smoke.’

‘This isn’t smoking,’ Sally insisted. ‘It is a kind of initiation. You don’t smoke a joint. You just inhale from it and then you pass it to Peter. You have to participate.’

‘Yes, we are very strong on conformity here,’ I added.

Maud raised her eyebrows, but she took the joint and drew hard on it. The smoke filled her mouth so that her cheeks were swollen like a chipmunk’s as she struggled to get any of the smoke into her lungs. But she failed and fell into such a violent bout of coughing and wheezing that she bent double and threw the joint away. I retrieved it and then showed her how to take the experience more coolly. Part of the trouble with Maud was sheer nerves. She was expecting violent hallucinations the moment she had ingested any of the smoke. But hash is not like that. Not usually anyway. It is mild and subtle. Not that one would guess this from reading Aleister Crowley on the subject. This thought having struck me, I went inside to fetch one of my red sorcery notebooks in which I have transcribed a quotation from Crowley’s essay, ‘The Herb Dangerous – The Psychology of Hashish’: